Feminist Theory and Critical Theory: Unexplored Synergies

2012 ◽  
pp. 66-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Martin
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory

Emancipation without Utopia: Subjection, Modernity, and the Normative Claims of Feminist Critical Theory

Hypatia ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 513-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Allen
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Diagnostic Analysis ◽  
Gendered Power ◽  
Depth And Complexity ◽  
Paradox Of Power

Feminist theory needs both explanatory‐diagnostic and anticipatory‐utopian moments in order to be truly critical and truly feminist. However, the explanatory‐diagnostic task of analyzing the workings of gendered power relations in all of their depth and complexity seems to undercut the very possibility of emancipation on which the anticipatory‐utopian task relies. In this paper, I take this looming paradox as an invitation to rethink our understanding of emancipation and its relation to the anticipatory‐utopian dimensions of critique, asking what conception of emancipation is compatible with a complex explanatory‐diagnostic analysis of contemporary gender domination as it is intertwined and entangled with race, class, sexuality, and empire. I explore this question through an analysis of two specific debates in which the paradoxical relationship between power and emancipation emerges in particularly salient and seemingly intractable forms: debates over subjection and modernity. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, I argue that a negativistic conception of emancipation offers the best way for feminist critical theory to transform the paradox of power and emancipation into a productive tension that can fuel critique.

scholarly journals Intet nyt under solen? Refleksion over feministisk teori

1997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bente Rosenbeck
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Conceptual Level ◽  
Jürgen Habermas ◽  
Critical Questions ◽  
Jurgen Habermas ◽  
Utopian Thinking ◽  
The Relationship

The article deals with the revival of Jürgen Habermas and critical theory in the debate of feminist theory and method. At the conceptual level the relationship between discourse and identity and the question of a non-discoursive concept of experience are discussed. Several feminist researchers who have been attracted by poststructuralist thinking now aim at a combination of Habermas and Foucault. (e.g. Lois McNay). Also Seyla Benhabib and her critical  questions about postmodernism and emancipation enjoy great prominence. Can feminist theory be postmodernist and still retain an interest in emancipation? The article encourages to consider the possible combination of Foucalt's critique of institutions and of power/knowledge with the utopian thinking of Habermas.

Experience

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Grant
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Consciousness Raising ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
Personal Politics ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Point Of Departure

This chapter analyzes multiple conceptualizations of experience developed within Anglo-American and French feminist theory, and traces their relation to the concepts “woman,” “patriarchy,” and “personal politics.” It explores experience as epistemological ground, as a mechanism of subject formation, as a technique in consciousness raising, and as a methodology. Taking the feminist sexuality debates as a point of departure, the chapter also situates the limitations of feminist notions of experience in relation to queer theory, critical theory, poststructuralism, and the problematics of humanism. Finally, the chapter shows how feminist theoretical uses of the idea of experience parallel explorations and developments of the concept in other non-feminist critical theories. Though it has very often been ignored or considered as something of an anomaly by other critical theorists, the chapter demonstrates that feminist theory is a kind of critical theory and situates it in that broader context.

Grounded Theory, Feminist Theory, Critical Theory

2003 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaysi Eastlick Kushner ◽  
Raymond Morrow
Keyword(s):  
Grounded Theory ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory

Promising Alliances: The Critical Feminist Theory of Nancy Fraser and Seyla Benhabib

2003 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margot Canaday
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Critical Feminist ◽  
Critical Feminist Theory ◽  
Nancy Fraser

This essay examines the work of Nancy Fraser and Seyla Benhabib, two philosophers who have demonstrated that feminist theorists can usefully draw upon both postmodernism and the critical theory tradition, with which Fraser and Benhabib are more clearly associated. I argue that each theorist claims the universal ideals and normative judgements of modernism, and the contextualism, particularity, and skepticism of postmodernism. I do this by revisiting each of their positions in the now well-known Feminist Contentions exchange, by examining the diverse ways in which they reconcile universalism and difference, and by exploring each theorist's critique of the Habermasian public sphere.

Feminist Theory, Critical Theory, and Management's Romance With the Technical

Affilia ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Lou Fenby
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory

Excluded Within

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sina Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political Agents

Why are some claims seen or heard as political claims, while others are not? Why are some people not seen or heard as political agents? And how does their political unintelligibility shape political bodies, and the terms of political agency, from which they are excluded? Excluded Within: The (Un)Intelligibility of Radical Political Actors argues that these people, and these claims, are excluded within these political bodies and terms of political agency. They remain within and continue to do the work of defining the terms of the bodies from which they are excluded. But because their remaining within these bodies is disavowed or repressed, these potentially radical actors are politically unintelligible to those bodies. This rich and methodologically creative work draws on philosophy, critical theory, feminist theory, and critical race theory to articulate who we are by virtue of who we exclude, and what claims we cannot see, hear, or understand.

Kindergarten theory: Childhood, affect, critical thought

2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniela Caselli
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Political Impact

Current notions of affect are often underpinned by unacknowledged assumptions about spontaneity, materiality and immediacy. Childhood, which has traditionally been associated with these concepts (and for this reason has not been much debated within critical theory), helps us reconsider the political impact of affect theory. This is both because feminist theory has recently reconceptualized childhood and because positing affect as moments of intensity immanent to matter raises a number of problems from a feminist point of view. A passage from Mrs. Dalloway (illustrating how childhood works as a mimetic break within the project of literary modernism) will introduce an analysis of excerpts from Lisa Cartwright and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, two feminist case studies in which affect and childhood are linked. Referring to past psychoanalytical and political debates (especially by Jacqueline Rose, Juliet Mitchell and Walter Benjamin) that have anticipated some of the problems we are currently facing within feminist theory, the article investigates through childhood the politically problematic role of affect as ‘the new’ in critical theory.

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